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Workshop on Social Protection for the Poor
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The Workshop on Social Protection for the Poor was held at the ADB Headquarters, Manila Philippines on 21-25 October 2002. Financed by the Japan Fund, the ADBI, ADB and IADB, the workshop is a result of the Partnership Agreement between the IADB and the ADB, signed last March 2001 in Santiago the Chile. Representatives from government, social protection agencies, international organizations, and NGOs participated in the seminar, both from Asian and Latin American countries, to strengthen ties across countries on both sides of the Pacific and learn from experiences in the two continents.
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Social protection exists in various forms for a long time: informal safety nets based on family or societal arrangements evolved over centuries. They aim to assist the weaker segments of society (individuals or groups of people) in times of economic hardship or disaster.
Formal social protection systems were introduced more than a hundred years ago in the then industrializing countries. Social protection was not given much attention in the past in many developing countries. However, this appears to be changing and many policies and procedures are now being reconsidered in order to strengthen and expand social protection schemes and to make them sustainable.
While all countries in Asia have some sort of formal social protection schemes, the key problem is that such schemes so far include only a small minority of the population. A large majority of people and in particular the poor in Asia are not covered by any form of formal social protection.
The recent Asian financial crisis, the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the meltdown of the Argentine economy highlighted once again the need for social protection in particular in times of crisis.
For these reasons, multilateral agencies have embarked in Social Protection as a critical priority to reduce poverty. The workshop is a joint effort of the ADBI, ADB and Inter-American Development Bank to bring together lessons and best experiences.
Participation of ADB staff would enable them to become familiar with the concepts of social protection and to learn from best practices how to introduce social protection schemes such as social assistance, social insurance or labor market policies.
The Seminar will focus on the main pillars of social protection and discuss their suitability for supporting the informal sector.
These topics will be included:
Participants will have a deeper understanding of socialprotection policies and how to best incorporate concerns relating to social protection into their project work.
The seminar will allow them to design technical assistance and loan projects/programs that will address the issue of improved living conditions of the poor.
Thirty to 35 participants from Asia, Pacific and Latin America will be invited mainly from
View the list of participants
Resource persons would be drawn primarily from organizations with well functioning statutory social protection organizations and from some NGOs/cooperatives offering informal social protection in Latin America and Asia.
Resource persons will focus their presentations on the conceptual development of social protection schemes and highlight the successes and failures of social protection expansion to the informal sector in Asia and Latin America that will allow participants to draw lessons from these cases and apply them to their own environment.
View list of resource speakers.
Dieter Bucher
Senior Capacity Building Specialist,
Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo
Email: dbucher@adbi.org
Josephine D. Javier
Trainer-Administrator, BPHR-OS and Seminar Coordinator
Asian Development Bank, Manila
Email: jjavier@adb.org
Tam Robert Nguyen
Inter-American Development Bank, Washington DC
Email: tamn@iadb.org
Isabel Ortiz
Senior Social Economist, ADB, Manila
Email: iortiz@adb.org
Zsi Zsi Rachman
Senior Human Resources Officer, ADB Manila
Email: zzrachman@adb.org
Phone: + 632 632 4444 (ADB)
Fax: +632 636 2444 (ADB
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